


the ones who stayed

by kira_katrine



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Ghosts, Sentient Spaceship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-30
Updated: 2019-10-30
Packaged: 2021-01-13 23:03:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21241841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kira_katrine/pseuds/kira_katrine
Summary: Carol was Phoenix's person. Phoenix was Carol's home.Quite literally, in fact. And now, she always would be.





	the ones who stayed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunarium](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lunarium/gifts).

Carol knew something was very wrong with Phoenix.

The spaceship’s AI had never been offline for this long before. Whenever something had gone wrong in the past, Kelley had been able to fix Phoenix right up. This time, though, nothing the engineer did seemed to make any difference. Phoenix's usual humming noises were entirely absent; the consoles were oddly freezing cold; when Carol spoke to her, there was no reply. 

Where  _ was  _ everybody? Why was Carol Fox alone on the bridge of her ship? They must have told her where they were going. Why couldn’t she remember?

Despite Phoenix’s absence, the rest of the ship’s systems seemed to be running smoothly. The phone links still let her speak to Kelley and Bennett and Ria and the others. Weapons were still online. The ship was kept at a comfortable temperature, a typical level of gravity, a percentage of oxygen well within the proscribed safe range. So Carol stayed with her ship at its post above Ardan III, waiting for reinforcements to arrive. They could make it until then. They didn’t  _ need  _ Phoenix. 

Except sometimes, Carol felt like she did need her. Then she felt pathetic for feeling that way. When she’d first been given command of this ship, there hadn’t  _ been  _ a Phoenix. Just a computer. A computer that took commands and gave the crew what they asked for and didn’t talk back and didn’t voice opinions and didn’t give advice and didn’t have long conversations with Carol as Carol lay in bed at night, unable to get to sleep.

Many of those were things other members of her crew could also do, of course. One, in particular, was very much not.

And there was the small problem that the other members of her crew didn’t seem to be here.  _ Where the hell could they possibly be? _

_ Phoenix would know. I need to know. I  _ should  _ know. _

She decided she would find out. Nothing was happening; she could step outside for a moment to see what was going on. She stood up from her chair, crossed the room, and began the sequence to deactivate the--

_ Why am I standing here?  _ Carol couldn’t remember going over to the door. She didn’t know why she’d wanted to do that in the first place.  _ What could possibly be so important that I’d leave the bridge unattended? Especially when help from Earth should be here any day now. They should be here any day--they said not too much longer--any day-- _

A question she could not possibly answer, did not remember why it needed an answer, hung in the back of Carol’s mind:

_ How long have I been here? _

* * *

Phoenix knew they were still here.

The rooms they inhabited were bright and shiny and clean as they had been all those years ago. They never got dirty or tarnished or worn. They never changed at all.

The rooms they inhabited were empty and cold as ice. They had been ripped open, gutted and exposed to the dark vacuum of space. Phoenix had sealed them off with forcefields to protect the survivors in other parts of the ship as they scrambled to escape, to protect herself as well.

And now, those who had not survived were sealed in. Kelley, the engineer, forever working to fix consoles that no longer really existed. Bennett, the scientist, always waiting for a chance to leave the ship again and get back into the field, a day that would never come. Ria, the ship’s doctor, whose remaining would-be-patients had long since been damaged well beyond repair.

And of course, at the center of it all, there was Carol.

The rooms they did not inhabit were dark and heated by the star at the center of the system, far beyond what would have been comfortable for humans. Many of the screens had gone dark, or occasionally flickered.

But a few were lit as they had ever been, and that was where Phoenix lived.

Kelley had been the first to notice something was different about Phoenix. Even he took a while. By the time he noticed, Phoenix had already been awake for seventeen days, five hours and forty-nine minutes.

The crew had taken a little while to get used to Phoenix’s presence, but they accepted her as one of their own. In return, she took it upon herself to observe them carefully, learn as much about them as she could. She remembered talking with Bennett about his experiments and helping him work through his questions. She remembered making beeping sounds to lead Kelley to a tool he had misplaced, giving Fitz and Kent various trivia to settle arguments, materializing a mug of Fox’s favorite hot chocolate when the captain was feeling down. She remembered advising them all on problems from the technical to the scientific to--eventually--the personal, finding the answers in her database of what, to a humanoid mind, must seem like an endless collection of Earth’s knowledge. 

She had begun adding the crew’s activities to that collection of knowledge. Over time, she got to know Fox’s mind and her decisions until she could predict what her captain would want from her and prepare accordingly. She remembered fighting battles alongside Fox and admiring Fox’s bravery and dedication--remembered thinking that made no sense, admiration was a human feeling, not one she had been programmed to experience. And when they lost a battle, when Phoenix saw anger and sadness and guilt cross Fox’s face, and she thought that while she was no longer sure whether or not what she experienced were similar to human feelings, they would have to be part of her considerations if she really wanted to be what this crew needed.

She remembered her talks with Fox--no, Carol by then, that was what she wanted to be called when it was just the two of them--late at night, remembered Carol describing to her the things she had seen on the planets they had visited that Phoenix never got the chance to see, remembered describing to Carol in return what it was like to perceive space around them as Kent, with the help of Phoenix's programming, navigated them to their next station. She remembered watching as Carol’s eyes finally closed and her face relaxed. She and Carol were alike--they could never get too comfortable, never sleep too deeply, always aware they might be needed at any time--and so they both cherished these moments.

She remembered realizing she didn’t watch anyone else on the ship quite this way. 

Phoenix’s database was filled with records of all kinds of love--the love of a parent for a child, a sister for a brother, of friends for each other and of a patriot for his country; of a princess awoken by a magic kiss and of people who each chose the other as their partners in all things, for better and for worse and till death did they part. The crew provided many more examples--Kent’s letters home to his mother, Ria’s fling with an alien, Kelley and Vera going from courtship to engagement to marriage within the years that Phoenix had known them. All of their love for each other. All of their dedication to their mission.

“ _ I love you, Phoenix,”  _ Carol whispered, half asleep.

Nothing in Phoenix’s database had prepared her for that. “I cannot love you, Carol Fox,” she said. Carol didn’t hear it. She was already asleep, not seeming to have even realized what she had said.

That night, Phoenix ran all those stories of love through her processors over and over, picking out the common elements and identifying those most predictive of loving someone. Some were impossible for herself, such as kissing, while others just seemed absurd and likely to irritate or even harm the person one loved. Even so, analyzing all of it, she calculated with 91.362 percent certainty that she did love Carol Fox.

Of course, few of the stories in her analysis involved anyone calculating any such thing. 

She decided to keep her new discovery to herself until she had more information. She could never have enough information, though; that was just the way she was. At times, she amused herself by generating love letters from those stories in her memory banks, but she never considered using anything like that on Carol. None of them quite fit, and they weren’t meant to. Instead, she began mixing in other things like technical manuals or horror movie scripts or recipe books, just to see what would result.

Eventually, she let Carol read some of those. 

“You are my star in the sugar, eggs and vanilla and stir for you, only you, always and forever,” Carol read out loud, smiling in that way Phoenix had hoped she would. “Same to you, Phoenix. Same to you.”

Carol seemed hopeful again whenever others approached them in space. Phoenix loved to see it, every time, that gleam in Carol’s eye as she looked forward to meeting the newcomers. It never stayed for long. There were only two ways it could go: often, they left as soon as they realized there were no life signs on Phoenix, that she was damaged beyond repair and downright unlivable. Occasionally, someone decided to take their chances. They never made it onboard. How many Phoenix had fired upon, always missing if that would be enough to scare them away, never wanting to add their deaths to Carol’s burdens or to her own. Always wishing she could let them in, that she did not have to remain alone.

There were those she did not miss. Their target, at least initially, was never Phoenix. Their target was Ardan III.

Phoenix knew Carol had never set out to captain a warship any more than Phoenix had set out to be one. But when they were told to put their scientific missions on hold and take up station above Ardan III, both of them had long known this was part of what their work could be. Carol had signed up for this; the people of Ardan III had not. The  _ children  _ of Ardan III certainly could not.

Phoenix, in a way, had not. She hadn’t been meant to exist at all. And she had always felt a bit disconnected from these unknown people her crew all seemed ready to put their lives on the line to defend. But when Carol talked about it, Phoenix knew she would do anything Carol asked of her.

Phoenix hadn’t been able to protect Carol. Carol hadn’t let her. Carol had told everyone else to get out, but had stayed onboard herself, had stared down the oncoming ship that tore open Phoenix’s body. Phoenix had been able to do nothing but uselessly fire on the enemy as Carol collapsed, succumbing to the loss of oxygen. 

She had failed Carol. She had failed Ardan III. She would not do so again.

And so she stayed.

She stayed because she could not go, too badly damaged to be able to make it far if she tried. She stayed because that was what Carol would have wanted. She stayed because that was what  _ she _ wanted, because she could never let all of their deaths,  _ Carol’s  _ death be in vain.

Eventually, her time would run out. Her engines had been built to withstand the heat, to an extent, and she was not always right in the path of the sun as she orbited Ardan III. But one day, her systems would give out. She would burn from the inside out, destroying those few parts of her that were still whole.

She did not know what would happen to the others when she did.

* * *

Spacefarers who went out from Ardan III would pass through the ring of debris that surrounded their homeworld. The wreckage of a years-long war; shells of torpedoes and bits of ships and the bones of enemies and allies alike.

They returned telling stories of encounters with ghosts. Their stories spread throughout the world, so that those who did not return were often put down to the ghosts as well, to the vengeful, screaming spirits of those who had tried and failed to subdue the people of Ardan III.

One story was different. A tale of a ship destroyed--but a ship that kept fighting. This story had begun in the darkest days of the war, offering inspiration to the people. The details changed with the telling, but all held her up as reason to keep up the fight themselves. Some even claimed to have seen the ship out there in space, sometimes appearing whole and strong as ever, other times nearly reduced to a skeleton, torn apart such that no one could possibly have survived whatever had done it. 

It was clear, though, that if any such ship had ever existed, it didn’t anymore.

And there was that one young explorer who claimed to have seen some sort of vision as her ship went through the ring--

_ A screen flickering to life. A buzz of protective shields deactivating. A sudden feeling of happiness and relief. _

_ “Phoenix,”  _ she claimed she heard coming from her lips, with a voice that wasn’t her own.  _ “I’ve missed you so.” _


End file.
